Cleanup underway after Burning Man party ends.
Time to Clean Up: Post-Burning Man Challenges
RENO, Nev.—The rain has passed, and the temple has burned. Now, as Burning Man slowly empties, it’s time to clean up.
Burning Man organizers have three weeks to clean up any remnants of the makeshift city plopped across over 4 square miles (10 square kilometers) of the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada, but a summer storm that left tens of thousands stranded in ankle-deep mud could alter that timeframe.
The annual gathering, which launched on a San Francisco beach in 1986, attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians, and activists to the sprawling stretch of public land for a weeklong mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances. One of the principles of Burning Man is to leave no trace—an expectation that all attendees will pack out everything they brought to Black Rock City and clean out their camps before leaving.
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But in the aftermath of torrential rains that closed roads, jammed traffic, and forced many to walk miles barefoot through the muck, the area is dotted with abandoned vehicles, rugs, furniture, tents, and trash. In a normal year, the desert floor is harder and easier to navigate, but flooding and deep imprints from vehicles spinning tires in the muck have made traveling there more difficult.
This week, many attendees descended on the airport in Reno, Nevada, to get last-minute flights home. Car washes at times turned away vehicles too caked in mud and clay, according to KTVN-TV in Reno. There are signs outside nearby grocery stores banning disposal of Burning Man-related trash and recycling in their bins.
Eleonora Segreti, who lives in central Italy and made her second visit this year to Burning Man, left the site early Tuesday.
Leave no trace is “a strong principle,” she said Tuesday after taking a shuttle to Reno-Tahoe International Airport. “If it is a matter of staying overnight one extra day to do the work to clean up, most of the people are doing that.”
But that sentiment is not felt by everyone. Jeffrey Longoria of San Francisco said since he started attending, trash issues have gotten worse.
“People are starting to leave a trace,” said Mr. Longoria, 37, while cleaning his mud-stained boots outside of a Walmart in Reno. “They’re forgetting the core principles of the burn.”
The erosion of those core principals might be in part because many of the festival’s original attendees have gotten older, he said, and there’s a wave of newer attendees—“the kind that have a couple hundred thousand-dollar RVs and are careless about the environment.”
A permit issued by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management requires Burning Man organizers to clear the area of debris after vehicles exit the desert, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) northeast of Reno. Burning Man organizers did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press about how the rain will impact the cleanup timeline.
In a media update Wednesday evening, organizers said “individuals who had to leave before their carpools and camps were ready to depart, and camps who needed to leave early due to the storm, are returning to the event site today through Saturday to disassemble their projects, tear down their camps, and remove their possessions.”
The temporary closure of the area for Burning Man is in effect for 66 days each year, according to the BLM: 31 to build the makeshift city, nine for the main event and 26 for post-festival cleanup.
Last year, after the festival’s return following a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Burning Man team narrowly passed its Oct. 7 inspection.
“But it was extraordinarily and alarmingly close,” the restoration team’s manager wrote earlier this year in a post on the Burning Man website summarizing last year’s cleanup efforts, while urging attendees leave no trace.
The post described 2022 as one of the “messiest playas in recent history”—evidenced by a 15-yard (13 meters) dumpster filled with cardboard boxes, glass bottles, carpeted rugs and plastic. The cleanup team also collected more than 1,000 tent stakes—“the most dangerous” and abundant debris left behind, according to the post.
During the 2022 inspection, BLM surveyed 120 different areas chosen at random across the festival site for trash and debris, according to Burning Man’s annual cleanup report. They failed eight of the tests last year and would not have passed if they had failed 12, according to the report.
Cleanup also involves smoothing out the dried lake bed with large rakes attached to trucks and picking up trash on the frequented highways, according to BLM spokesperson John Asselin.
Next month, teams made up of federal employees and Burning Man organizers will again conduct a site inspection. Event organizers will be on the hook for any r
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